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Sunday, September 19, 2004

The self-absorption of science.

Many months ago, Scott Aaronson initiated a discussion on Lance's blog about the appropriate amount of time to spend on one's research (quick answer: all). Lance was quick to adjust this in a later post, saying "Your success in academics, like any professional endeavor, depends in part on how much effort you put into it with the relationship far more than linear. But by no means is social life and a productive research career incompatible."

I was reminded of this discussion whilst reading a book that excerpted small sections from Charles Darwin's autobiography. Here is Darwin reflecting on his absorption in science:

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding laws out of large discussions of facts...Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds ... gave me great pleasure... Pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and have found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me... Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on....

Darwin goes on to theorize that a lack of "poetic stimulation" as it were atrophied the sections of his brain that would have appreciated the arts, and felt that if he could have lived his life over again, he would have spent more time cultivating artistic pursuits, because

The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Especially in more theoretical areas of computer science, it is the easiest thing in the world to become absorbed in your work: all you really need is a pen and paper. There is also a thrilling sense of abandonment, of being swallowed whole by a collection of lines, or a manifold, or a linear program, as one delves deeper and deeper into the mysteries of one's work. Darwin's sense of regret as he looks back is an interesting perspective on such a life of absorption. I don't think that everyone would agree, but it is a sentiment worth keeping in mind.